Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell

Phil bought this for Christmas 2004…. and it has sat on the “Books to read” bookshelf ever since…. It’s not that I didn’t want to read Cloud Atlas, just that as a hefty hardback I knew that it would be awkward to read in bed, which is where I do most of my reading.

However, it turned out to be a classic “I’ve started so I’ll finish”, in the sense that I just kept having to turn the pages, to read “just one more chapter”. I loved the way the book’s structure and story set mirror a book’s physical make up of each of the signatures (I’ve just had to look that up on Wikipedia), where you only get a continuous selection of text printed on the middle pair of pages.

I also really liked the way David Mitchell gradually revealed the connections between the stories and their narrators, and carried forward a narrative stretching from the 19th century to an unspeficied number of centuries in the future.

If you enjoy fiction in flavours raning from historical, to modern, to science, then read this novel!